I want to talk about the drag queen moral panic. The "DragQueens" search has been surging on TikTok and I've been posting about it, and every time I post about it I get the same responses from the same types of accounts, and I want to address them directly and publicly because I think the argument I have to make is one that actually lands differently coming from me.
I am a bisexual woman who grew up evangelical. I spent twenty years in church spaces. I was in youth ministry, at church camps, on mission trips, in Sunday school programs. I know the interior of evangelical youth ministry in the way that you know a place you grew up in: the specific smells, the specific sounds, the people who made things better and the people who did damage. I am not speaking about this from the outside. I am speaking from inside knowledge, with a perspective that is not easily dismissed as secular ignorance of what these communities are actually like.
And from the inside of that knowledge, I want to say clearly: I have never been harmed by a drag queen. I have never witnessed a child being harmed by a drag queen. I have been harmed by the church, specifically by the shame-training and the conversion-adjacent counseling I've written about elsewhere, and so have many people I grew up with, in ways that range from the psychological harm I experienced to significantly worse things that happened in significantly more closed contexts.
The geography of child safety and the geography of the moral panic about it do not overlap. And I think it's important to say that as specifically as I can.
The Actual Data on Where Abuse Happens
This is not an opinion section. This is a statistics section.
The organizations with documented, persistent, institutional patterns of child sexual abuse are not drag performance spaces. They are institutions with high degrees of authority over children, low external accountability, and structural incentives to suppress disclosure. Religious institutions are overrepresented in these patterns. Youth sports organizations. Scouting programs. Environments where an adult has unsupervised, trusted, institutionally-sanctioned access to children and where the child has been taught that the adult's authority is sacred or at minimum unquestionable.
The data on this is not obscure or contested. It has been documented by investigative journalists, documented in court records, documented in the independent commission reports from multiple denominations that spent years examining their own institutional failures. The Southern Baptist Convention's 2022 independent investigation found over 700 abusers in their records over two decades. The Catholic Church's abuse crisis has been documented across multiple countries. These are the institutions currently expressing concern about the influence of drag performers on children.
I want to be precise here: the individual people in these institutions doing the moral-panic messaging are mostly not themselves abusers. The rhetorical pattern is the problem. The strategic misdirection of concern about child safety toward a population (LGBTQ people, performers, people who transgress gender norms) that has no documented record of institutional harm, while the institutions doing the pointing have very well-documented records that they have been actively suppressing. This is not coincidence. This is how moral panic operates: it creates a visible, frightening other, and the fear it generates consumes the oxygen that might otherwise go to questions about where harm is actually happening.
Drag Performance and What It Actually Is
The TikTok search term "DragQueens" produces a wild range of content, the viral performances, the political controversy, the drag story hours, the defenders and the protestors. And somewhere in the mix are actual drag performers just doing what drag performers do, which is: put on an elaborate costume and character, perform, often with humor and irreverence, and give an audience a memorable show.
Drag is a performance tradition with long roots. Centuries of theatrical cross-dressing, pantomime dame, vaudeville, camp, and the specific art form that developed in LGBTQ communities where performance and identity played out in complex ways against a backdrop of persecution. It is performance. Costume. Heightened character. Often comedy. Sometimes genuine art. Always (when done well) a performance that is self-aware about being a performance.
That self-awareness is actually the thing. Drag is honest about what it is. A drag queen in full costume and makeup is not pretending to be something they aren't. They are very explicitly and visibly constructing a character, performing it, and then taking it off at the end of the night. The artifice is the whole point. The theatricality is the whole aesthetic.
Compare this to the theater of the pulpit, which I know from the inside. The performance of certainty. The performance of authority. The costuming of institutional power in the language of divine mandate. The character of the pastor or the youth pastor or the elder, constructed and maintained with as much deliberate craft as any drag look, but with the crucial difference that the performance is presented as not being a performance. As being the face and voice of ultimate reality. As deserving a deference that bypasses the critical faculties.
I'm not saying every preacher is performing or that religious expression is inherently theater. I'm saying that the moral panic about drag, about performance, about costume, about constructed identity, is coming from institutions that are also in the construction business, and the selective concern about which kinds of construction harm children is worth noticing.
What Actually Helped Me and What Actually Hurt
Let me be personal for a minute because the personal specifics matter here.
What helped me, growing up queer in a church environment, was any exposure to the idea that queer people existed and were whole and were fine. Any movie or book or person I encountered where LGBTQ people were just living their lives without being positioned as cautionary tales or objects of pity or threats to social order. Every one of those moments was a small release valve on the pressure of believing something was fundamentally wrong with me. None of those moments happened in church. Several of them happened in specifically artistic contexts, theater, music, performance spaces, where the rules about how people presented themselves were more fluid and less surveilled.
What hurt me was exactly what I've described in other posts: the shame training, the conversion-adjacent counseling, the religious structure that defined my sexuality as a problem requiring management. The hurt came from people with authority over me who believed they were helping. The help produced harm. The mechanisms were institutional and the damage was real.
No drag queen was involved in any of the things that hurt me. No drag queen ever sat across from me in a counseling session and explained that my attractions to women were a wound that needed healing. No drag queen told me that the version of me that knew itself fully was sinful and required correction. The drag queens I eventually encountered, in my mid-twenties, in cities, in the life I built after I left, were people in elaborate costumes being funny and warm and sometimes profound, making art and making community and not asking a single thing from me except that I enjoy the show.
the honest comparison
I want to close with something direct, because I think the directness matters.
When people post about protecting children from drag queens, I want to ask them what specific harm they're preventing. I want them to be specific about the mechanism. I want them to explain, in concrete terms, how a child watching a performance in sequins and heels is damaged, and I want them to match that explanation's specificity against the documented patterns of harm in the institutional environments they're defending.
I know what it feels like to have your understanding of your own identity restructured by adults with authority over you, using the tools of shame and prayer and "accountability." I know what it produces and how long it lasts and what it costs to undo. That is the thing that should concern anyone who cares about children. The actual documented location of the actual documented harm.
My problem, as I have said before, is the pulpit, not the pew. The people sitting in the pews believe they're protecting something real. The people running the moral panic have a different project. They are using "protection of children" as the container for something else, and the something else is the removal of LGBTQ people, performers, teachers, parents, any visible queer presence, from public life. The children are a rhetorical device, not an actual concern. The actual concern is power, which is what it always is.
The drag queens are fine. Leave them alone. Ask harder questions about the institutions making the noise.
I'm going to go work on this record now. Some of these songs are very specifically about what I've said in this post, and I want to get them right. I want them to be specific and honest and land where they need to land. For the people still in those rooms. For the people who got out. For the people who don't have the context to see what the moral panic is actually doing. All of you are why I'm writing. I love you. Don't be afraid of the queens.